Pages

Thursday, 2 February 2012

I
am very unhappy with the number of female Lib Dem MPs. 7 out of 57 is not good
enough and we need to improve. The leadership programmewhich assists those from
underrepresented groups to become candidates will hopefully help.

7/57 = 12.3%. So less than an eighth of our MPs are women.

The
Conservatives have 48/307 = 15.6%. Labour have 81/258 = 31.4%.

Activists from the two other parties have pointed this out to me
on numerous occasions. They are right to. It is embarrassing.

We definitely need more female candidates. In 2010 we only had
134 (21.3%). The Conservatives had 149 (23.7%), Labour 191 (30.3%).

But I looked more deeply into the 2010 general election data and
discovered some interesting things.

Firstly, when you look at the total vote for each party, and
then look at total votes for males and females for each party, Labour do best
with 32.4% of their vote going to women. But second best are Lib Dems with 22%.
The Conservatives, despite fielding more women and ultimately getting more
female MPs proportionally than the Lib Dems only had 19.8% of their votes go to
women.

I wondered why this was so I took all the votes for women for
each of the parties and worked out what the average vote for females vs males
was:

Conservative males: 17,811

Conservative females: 14,204

Labour males: 13,248

Labour females: 14,583

Lib Dem males: 10,739

Lib Dem females: 11,201

It would seem that Conservative women tend to be in seats that
are more difficult for them to win on average than those for their male
counterparts.

Finally a "what if" exercise. The other two parties
have many more MPs than us. When it comes to improving female representation
the marginal seats are endlessly discussed. But I just looked at the top 100
seats in terms votes won by each party. How many women were candidates?

Labour: 27/100

Lib Dem: 25/100 (although of course we only won 57 of them)

Conservatives: 9/100

We are only just behind Labour, even with their years of women
only shortlists. The Conservatives are way behind. If for some strange reason
their vote had dropped to a level where they only got 100 MPs they would have
had 9 female MPs. Incidentally, if they had only 57 MPs like us they would have
had only 5.

At the very least I would suggest this analysis shows things are
more mixed than the "Lib Dems are worst at trying to balance gender for
MPs" accusation you regularly hear. It would appear our old friend First
Past the Post is exacerbating the problem.

That 22% of our votes went to female candidates but only
resulted in around 12% of our MPs being female is typical of a majoritarian
electoral system. Perhaps
if we had a fairer one, the representation of women and ethnic minorities would
be further advanced than it currently is for all parties.